The Fisherman Who Rode a Horse

By Kenneth Watters

This book will give you lots of laughs most of the time and leave you scratching your head the rest of the time.
It is about life in the fishing industry starting with crayfishing then trawling for prawns followed by beach seine fishing.
It is about the life of a teenager going from school to fishing then becoming an electronic engineer for NASA and finally going into research in the fishing industry. Along the way he led a life filled with fun and adventure riding out cyclones at sea, also known as hurricanes, got into trouble on several occasions and closely avoided death on at least one occasion. The book follows the fishing industry over half the Australian coastline from Fremantle in Western Australia to Cairns in Queensland and life at the Carnarvon NASA Tracking Station and college then the Orroral Valley Tracking Station nestled in the snowy mountains.
This is an autobiography of one who has enjoyed life to it’s fullest and married a wonderful woman.
I am sure you will not be disappointed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: May 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781982297343

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Copyright © 2023 Kenneth Watters.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-9733-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9734-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023908543

Balboa Press rev. date:  05/18/2023

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.     Jurien Bay

2.     Sailing North

3.     The Arrival

4.     Cyclone Elsie 1964

5.     The Season Of ‘64

6.     Snag Island

7.     Xmas ‘64

8.     Geraldton

9.     Prawning in ‘65

10.   A Sad Farewell, Sailing For Fremantle

11.   Beach Seine Fishing The Bay

12.   Life Ashore

13.   Pro Roo Shooting

14.   Xmas 1966

15.   Carnarvon

16.   Back to School

17.   Once I couldn’t spell engineer now I is one

18.   Eastward Ho!

19.   Orroral Valley

20.   Settling down to family life

21.   A Dilemma

22.   Home at Last

23.   Off Again

24.   Settling Into Queensland

25.   Life in the Tropics

26.   Cape York

27.   Pen Pak

28.   Wetter Than Wet

29.   74 Season

30.   Going Home

31.   Home at Last

32.   Highway Cowboy

33.   Back to My Roots

34.   Geraldton ‘74

35.   Abrolhos Islands

36.   Navigating the Islands

37.   Trawling the Abrolhos

38.   Living on the Edge

39.   Close to the Wind

40.   A Very Rough Passage

Epilogue

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of my life from 1963 to 1975.

I left High School with very acceptable results in 1963 to go fishing professionally up and down the West Australian coast. I rode out several cyclones at sea, joined in the fun and games of my peers both ashore and at sea.

I was involved in most types of fishing, crayfishing, shark fishing, prawn fishing, tuna fishing and beach seine fishing.

In 1966 I took a job at the Carnarvon NASA Tracking Station between seasons where I developed a very strong interest in how it all worked. I returned to school at the WA Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) and graduated as an Electronic Engineer in 1970 and from there I became an Engineer at the NASA Tracking Station at Orroral Valley in the Mountains of the ACT.

In 1974 I left the Tracking Station to return to Carnarvon in West Australia to take a position, with the Nor West Whaling Company, as research engineer. After 6 months in Carnarvon NWW transferred me to Queensland to do research for their Gulf of Carpentaria fleet, home ported in Cairns. Having a strong desire to return to WA for the birth of our second son and not being happy in Cairns my wife and I journeyed back to WA to take up a position with the M G Kailis group to do further research in the fishing game.

While writing this autobiography in 2003 my wife and I were living in Ocean farm. A friend living close by called in and asked if I would like to accompany him on a farm run. He was managing several farms in the area. On the way back to Ocean Farm we had a very nasty accident. We were travelling on a dirt road and as we came over a crest found a vehicle coming at us down the centre of the road, quite normal on a dirt road. Bob went to the left as far as he could as the crest was atop a cutting and the banks on each side of the road were quite high. The van coming at us turned to the same side of the road and we hit head on. The young guys in the van were from Norway and they drive on the right side of the road opposite to us Aussies,

The young guys were both killed. I took it pretty badly as they were kids the same age as my two boys going off windsurfing at Gnarloo the same spot my kids surfed. I came down with a severe case of depression and closed of writing my biography. If there is ever a strong enough demand I might take it up again as I have another 20yrs of fishing experience culminating in operating a hovercraft service between Carnarvon and Monkey Mia.

I would like to thank my wife for not only putting up with my long absences at sea and raising my two wonderful boys but for being my best critique.I would also like to thank Terry Kierans an ex Tracky for editing my book.

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JURIEN BAY

It was 1963 the last year of school, or so I thought. In those years it was called 5th. year High. It had been a good year for me I had made the State colts rugby league side, represented Tuart Hill High in swimming, won the junior beach sprint championship at Trigg Surf life saving club and I was well and truly ready to go out and face my future.

Way back as far as I could remember whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up the answer had always been A Fisherman Who Rides a Horse. I had spent all my young life following my father to various crayfishing camps on weekends and any other chance Dad had to get away and was sometimes lucky enough to go out pulling pots. I absolutely loved the life of the fishermen and the sea itself, the rougher the better for me. I can only remember being seasick the once, I think that I was always too excited to give seasickness a thought.

Dad was not too happy about me going fishing for a living but gave into my persistence and found me a job as deck-hand for a cray fisherman by the name of Brian Morey who was fishing out of Jurien Bay at the time.

The day after my final Leaving Examination Dad dropped me off at Brian’s and we set off for Jurien in Brian’s Landrover.

We travelled up to Gin Gin and then onto a dirt track through Mugumber and Dandaragan. It was a very hot dusty and rough trip and I was very glad to come over the hill into Jurien Bay.

After we unloaded the Landrover Brian handed me a shovel, a hammer and a cold chisel and said.

Ken see those two 44’s over the back?

Yeh.

Well knock the tops and bottoms out and bury them one atop the other at the end of that track.

You want a Dunny Brian?

Yeh.

OK.

Boy O Boy what a start to my fishing career, I was lucky that I had done a lot of Banjo work for Dad over the years and also a bit of hammer and chisel work. It was 110 degrees in the water bag and the sand was that fine white stuff that flows like water. It was a hell of a job just keeping it out of the hole, let alone going any deeper, but I was fit and keen to impress and went at it like a Trojan. I think Brian was impressed but didn’t say much.

Brian’s wife was a great lady and a great cook. After eating a humongous meal that night I went to bed in the annex so exhausted and with tummy so full no amount of anticipation of going to sea the next day was going to keep me awake.

It was 4.30am.

Wakey Wakey Hands off Snakey.

Ugh.

Wakey Wakey breakies ready.

It was Brian, I shot out of bed, today is the day boy o boy lets go.

We had breakfast, I grabbed my boots, we climbed into the Landrover and headed off down to the beach. Brian had been off to get the bait the evening before while I was digging the long drop. We loaded this into the dinghy on the beach and pushed out. Brian let me row and sat on the back thwart guiding us through the dawn. Boats could be heard starting their motors and we passed a shadowy outline of the only boat between us and the ‘Kay’. Shortly after the order came ship oars watch your fingers we bumped alongside Brian’s boat Kay.

The Kay was smaller than Theo Rose’s boat ‘Helen’ or other boats Dad had taken me on over the years but this was my boat and she was beautiful.

She was 30ft long with a very small wheelhouse at the stern, a petrol driven Volvo stern-drive with a nice steamy exhaust Brian claimed cleaned your bum while you hung your backside over the stern, and a mast up the pointy end which would whip backwards and forwards whenever the bow came down heavy over a wave.

We lifted the bags of bait over the side from the dinghy then I watched Brian check the oil and water in the Volvo. He cranked it over and it rumbled into life. Brian then took me to the bow and watched closely as I tied the Dinghy painter to the mooring rope. I let the mooring line drop over the bow and he beckoned me back to the wheelhouse, a few rays of sunshine were just starting to poke over the hills behind Jurien. As we slowly motored South to a passage between a little Island and the beach I looked back to see many larger boats heading to a more northerly channel. Once clear of the bay Brian slipped a rope over a spoke of the wheel and signalled me to follow him to the bow, he cut open one of the bags of bait and spilled a heap of sheep heads onto the deck. They had been split down the middle but some skin held the two halves together. Brian gave me a knife and set me to cutting the two halves apart and went back to the wheel. Boy! it was the first time I had seen sheep-heads used for bait, all Dads mates used hocks and fish. If anyone was going to be sick now was the time but I was too excited to let it bother me and set about getting the job done as quickly as I could. Then I could sit back and enjoy the ride. I learnt very quickly that nobody gets to sit around enjoying themselves very often on a working boat, there is always something to be done and Brian was a great teacher. To have fun on a working boat the work itself had to become the fun, you treat the whole job as a big game where you strive to do each and every job faster and better than any other deckie past or present. Brian was always seeing the silly side of everything we did and life was just fun fun fun. He always got a laugh whenever an eye in the sheep head squirted back into my face as I pushed a skewer through it to fix it into the pot. I could never understand why he chose to use the horrible things when cow hocks were so nice and clean. Every afternoon after taking the catch around to the factory I had to drop Brian off at the camp and take tomorrow’s sheep-heads out to the Kay and cut them apart and lay them out on deck meat side to the sun. On the way out to the grounds I would collect them up and put them in a bait box near the skinning table. Brian had caught a lot of mullet during the off season that he had salted down in a large corrugated iron water tank. We used these in bait baskets along with the sheep-heads. Brian said that the fish bait got the crays into the pots and the sheep-heads kept them there.

On the full moon in January of ‘64 Brian decided to replenish his fish bait supply and we loaded a heap of mullet net into the back of the Landrover and picked up the dinghy from the beach. Brian knew that I had driven Dad’s Landrover along the beaches around Yanchep and Hillary’s and after giving me instructions on watching for soft spots in the sand, shown up by tufts of dead seaweed poking through, and telling me to stay above the wet sand we set off along the beach south from Jurien. Brian sat on the cab roof so he could spot for schools of mullet. We had travelled about two miles south of Jurien to where a lot of limestone rock was poking through the sand above the high water mark. I drove down lower on the beach to get around the rock and the front end of the Landrover just dropped out from under us. Brian went skidding off the roof and across the bonnet of the Landrover. I had driven into some very soft sand that went up to your knees as you walked. Brian was not very happy, he had told me to stay high up on the beach and away from the wet sand. Luckily there was an old dinghy washed up on the beach about one hundred yards back that was beyond repair we walked back to this with what tools we could find in the Landrover and started pulling it apart to get some timber to lay under the wheels of the Landrover. With a lot of digging and pushing we finally backed the Landrover out of the sand. Brian drove across the rocks and gave me back the wheel as he clambered back up onto the cab.

Another mile down the beach he leant in the cab window and told me to pull up. Brian backed the Landrover down the beach a little and we hauled the dinghy out of the back and dragged it down to the waters edge, we then pulled the net into the back of the dinghy and as Brian pushed away from the beach with the net running out over the stern I stood holding the end ropes of the net trying to spot the fish Brian assured me were there. Eventually a mullet jumped out of the water between Brian and the beach, I knew then that we had fish. Brian headed back to the beach and showing perfect judgement grabbed the other end of the net as it flipped over the back of the dinghy as it grounded. We pulled the net, working towards each other, until we were about ten yards apart then we got stuck right into pulling the net ashore. It was not long before the water became alive with fish, hundreds started jumping over the net and Brian gave me a hurry up. The water was boiling with mullet and it was all Brian and I could do to drag the net clear of the water. We both raced back down picking up mullet trying to wriggle their way back to the water and threw what we could catch onto higher ground. By the time we had finished we had a nice load of about 300 pound of fish. When we arrived back at the camp we put the mullet into the old water tank in layers with heaps of salt between each layer.

Brian fished in close to the reefs to the south of Jurien and on the days when a big swell came up over night he would have me stand on the wheelhouse roof and stamp twice when I felt it safe to make a run in to retrieve a pot inside the breaker line. He wouldn’t pull the pot there, he would just take a turn around a stern bollard with the header rope and tow the pot out of the area. I would remain on watch atop the wheelhouse and if I was to see a swell coming that looked like it was going to break I had to start stamping and just keep stamping till we got out of the danger zone. Boy did that little mast up the bow oscillate going over some of those waves, so did my heart for that matter. We often had dolphins surfing down the face of the waves as we climbed over the crest, they must have thought us mad. I learnt over the following years that many fishermen believe the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I have seen Mackerel fisherman riding the crest of creaming waves just trying to get that little closer to the rocks or reef where they are convinced all the biggest and best mackerel hang out while all those rock hopping fishermen on the beach are getting bigger and better gear trying to cast all the way to Africa. They are convinced all the bigger and better fish are way out beyond the break. In the years that followed I always played coward when it came to taking chances at sea and that is probably one of the reasons I never really liked Mackerel fishing much.

Well back to Jurien, Brian used to pick up around twenty pots then drop them off usually at a good speed. As we pulled the pots Brian did the winching and I did the skinning and baiting. Brian would place the coil for each pot on the deck and after the pot was baited I would stack the pot in such a way that as we dropped the pots I would know where the rope for each pot was placed. With twenty pots onboard, the deck remaining was just a maze of rope, Brian would be steering the Kay in and out along an edge or alongside a reef and give me a nod when he wanted the pot dropped, I would be standing at the bulwarks with a pot ready to go and my eye on the rope and floats belonging to the pot, when I got the signal from Brian I would drop the pot and start throwing the rope over. You had to be careful not to get caught up in the rope as it snaked over the side. I must have thought it out in my mind as to what I would do if this was to happen because one day after releasing a pot I found that I was standing right in the middle of the coil of rope for that pot. The rope seemingly jumped up all around me and I dived straight over the side before it had a chance to tighten around my legs. I went over the side fully decked out in my wet weather gear and apron and boots, Brian saw me go and stopped the boat but by the time the boat stopped I had sunk out of sight. Later he told me he had time to bring the boat around and circle where I’d gone over before I surfaced. All I have been able to remember of the incident is diving over the side then swimming back to the Kay. I was completely undressed, I lost my boots, jacket and clothes. How I ever got the apron string undone I do not know.

We never pulled any more pots that day, Brian was more shaken up over the event than I was but I was the colder, I had to go ashore wrapped in cray bags. I took a change of clothing every tine I went fishing after that. Brian was still pretty upset and the event was the talk of Jurien for quite sometime.

In the early 60’s Jurien was made up of holiday shacks, tents and caravans and one store that doubled as the local pub and surgery. The one and only time I ever suffered with salt water boils I had to front up to the shop for Penicillin injections. I had to drop my strides in the store and hang over the counter while the old fella who ran the store stabbed the needle in. On the days too windy to fish the fishermen would all gather on the stores veranda and knock off a few tinnies. There were two 44 gallon drums on the end of the veranda and on a good day they would need to be emptied early afternoon.

I had a few more sessions at the local store but it was not till after Xmas that I had my first real session. I loved listening to the banter going back and forth between the fishermen. I still laugh to myself when I remember one fisherman having a go at another, who I only know as Portuguese John.

Portuguese John had been bringing in big catches some as high as 100 bags and without radar in those days nobody had been able to find where he was fishing. Anyhow one Aussie born fisherman reckoned he was being greedy and should share the ground with the rest of them. After awhile it was obvious John was never going to part with his knowledge and the thing that makes me laugh was a statement shouted out by John as he left the veranda one day.

I don’t want to be a rich man I just want to make a goooood living.

The way he was fishing he would have been a millionaire in no time.

Another memorable event was seeing the fishing boat Rising Fast coming into Jurien with a gaping hole amid-ships. The crew had stuffed blankets and bags into the hole to keep her afloat. Escorting her in was the freezer boat Lady of Fatima skippered and owned by Mr. Sam De Sousa. Apparently the Lady of Fatima had collided with the Rising Fast which was now sinking slowly. They made temporary repairs to the Rising fast and took her to Fremantle for a major repair job. A steel plate was bolted over the hole in the Lady of Fatima and she finished the season. I was told that after she was properly repaired, at the end of season, her forward compartment was filled with concrete. The story going around at the time was that the Lady of Fatima had caught the Rising Fast pulling her pots and had accidentally ran into her.

Well Christmas had finally arrived and Brian and wife Kay were going to Perth for 3 or 4 days so we loaded up the Landrover. This time I had to sit in the back but no rough road could dampen my spirits as I headed for Perth with my first pay-cheque. I was really looking forward to catching up with my mates Bruce and Terry and spending time with my family.

For the first time in my life I had money to burn. I bought Christmas presents for Mum and Dad and my brothers John and Bub and baby Mark. I had heaps left and bought myself a leather jacket, which I still wear today, a 12 x 14ft tent, a Browning pump action rifle and a large steel trunk.

Two days after Christmas we headed back to Jurien and I was eager to set up my own camp with my tent. Luckily there was plenty of room near Brian’s caravan so I could still look forward to Kay’s great meals without having to travel too far in the dark. I would lay awake at night listening to the generators running around Jurien, it was all in harmony. There were several of those old hit and miss motors, they had huge flywheels and the motor would build up to a certain number of revs and then cut out, the flywheel would keep things going for a while then when the revs dropped to a given level the motor would fire up, build itself up to the set revs then cut out again. It was necessary to be really tired before you could sleep at Jurien but this was never a problem after a good days work.

Not long after Christmas I had my first real drinking session at the local store. It was great I was now accepted by all the fishermen as one of their own and as an adult, I went tinny for tinny with them all and by the time Brian was ready to head back to camp I was well and truly sloshed. Brian dragged me out of the Landrover and half carried, half dragged me to my tent. He dropped me in the door and staggered back to his van. I fell down on my camp-stretcher fully clothed. The tent went spinning around and round, after several minutes I tasted the bile and knew I had to make a move. I fell off the stretcher and crawled out of the tent on all fours and chucked up. The next morning I woke to Brian’s shaking and lay there in the dark wondering what the strange lump was in my mouth. I bit down on it only to find it was my tongue. I staggered out of bed and splashed plenty of cold water over my face and tried to make myself presentable for breakfast. Brian and Kay had plenty to laugh about, I went for extra snaggers and eggs and by the time I’d finished eating I was starting to feel almost human again. It was a very long day at sea and I came very close to calling Gert over the side of the Kay. But I hung onto my breakfast and my pride and lived to fight another day.

Not long after Xmas, a group of spear-fishermen in their early twenties was waiting on the beach for us. I think Brian had met them and made arrangements before hand. We were going to tow them in their 14 foot aluminium dinghy out to a reef south of Jurien and drop them off to do some spear-fishing and then pick them up on our way home. We had them in tow about thirty minutes from Jurien when working up at the bow of the Kay I spotted a large shark. I gave a yell and pointed it out to Brian as we went past. Brian in turn pointed it out to the guys in the dinghy behind us. The guys in the dinghy, already were dressed to go, grabbed their spear-guns and they all jumped over the side of the dinghy in hot pursuit of the shark. Brian stopped the Kay and circled around behind the crazy idiots. We eventually recovered them all with arms and legs still attached. Brian gave them a good talking to and told them if they jumped again before we got to the reef he would let their dinghy go and they could make their own way back to Jurien. Well chastised the guys stayed in the dinghy until we reached the spot they had asked for. We let them off and made arrangements to pick them up in a couple of hours. By the time we got back to them they had a good assortment of fish and were more than ready to head back into Jurien. They had not spotted any more large sharks but had speared a smaller gummy shark to take home. The following year when I was prawning in Shark Bay I heard on the news that a school mate from Scarborough High School had been taken by a white pointer while spear-fishing at Jurien. It was John Bartle who had been school captain at Scarborough in 1961 when I was doing my Junior year.

We came to a period where our catch started to have a high number of what we called furries, these were crayfish that were undersized by the barest of margins, the cray gauge actually went over the carapace into the fur behind. These crayfish if caught on a processing boat, colloquially called freezer boats, would be kept and processed and the tails would nearly always go legal weight. Brian decided that we would keep these crays and process them ourselves and sell them to the local processor. We weighed every tail and with the very few that did not go legal weight we took out the flesh and placed it into a modified syringe, we then injected this into the bum of other tails that just missed the weight. I remember going into the processing works late one night carrying a baby bath full of the now legal tails and when half way across the floor I was met by the factory foreman in the company of the fisheries inspector. Luckily there was a long stainless steel processing bench between us and I had to carry the tub around keeping it low enough that the inspector could not see it and at the same time trying not to show the strain of carrying about 60lb of tails around, all the time keeping benches between me and the inspector, when the inspector was distracted by the company foreman I managed to place the tub on the floor and slide it under the bench into an adjacent aisle. Luckily the inspector left without spotting the tub. Brian got a real sweat up when I told him how close I had come to being caught and I doubt he ever tried that stunt again.

While I was working on the Kay my father was re-fitting the Winkle, a trawler that he had bought the year before in Carnarvon and had sailed to Exmouth to fish. Mid February of 1964 I sadly said goodbye to Brian and Kay and hitched a ride back to Perth to join Dad on the Winkle for the trip to Shark Bay.

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SAILING NORTH

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When I arrived home I found that I had passed my Leaving exam with distinctions in Maths A and B and Physics.

Dad had finished re-fitting the Winkle, he had taken the old Ford diesel out and replaced it with a Gairdener diesel of less BHP but more torque at lower revs. He had also fitted a new trawl winch and the boat was looking like a million dollars. She was one of the smallest in the prawning fleet, being only 46 ft. in length, however she was comfortable and a proven sea boat. There were still a few jobs to do before we could set sail for Shark Bay. I helped Dad’s skipper, Ken Simnet, make up new nets while Dad sorted out all the stores and spare parts that we would need for the trip.

As all of Dad’s fishing had been as an amateur, up till now, he did not have the recognised sea-time to get a skippers ticket. If he had kept records of all the time he spent on small work boats with the army during the war, or all the time he had spent aboard professional fishing boats with his mates every chance he had, he would have had enough sea-time to get a Master Mariners Ticket. However dad was lucky enough to find a skipper with plenty of trawling experience and who was the best net-maker that I ever came across during my 30yrs of fishing. You could throw Ken into a telephone booth with a bundle of net and he would come out with a Drinan net cut out, sewn up and ready to hang. We used cotton nets in those days and we were forever making up new ones and taking them ashore to hang. These new nets had to be tarred to prevent rot and to give them stiffness and protection against chaffing. About every sixth week they had to be re-tarred. Luckily synthetic materials started coming onstream in 1964 and this made all our jobs much easier. I will get back to that later because at last we were ready to sail North. The Winkle was fully loaded, Dad even had a huge Flame tree trunk lashed on deck for Mum. Another trawler owned and skippered by Cec Piesse was also ready to sail so we left together. Cec was the most experienced fisherman on the coast at the time having done a lot of the research of Shark Bay with the Fisheries aboard the old Peron. He was an absolute gentleman and had a one legged cook aboard who could get around like a teenager in the roughest of weather. Cec’s boat was called the Nanango and was an old army fairmile and twice the size of the Winkle. It sure was comforting to see her alongside for the lonely journey North. We maintained radio contact all the way. The trip was the calmest that I was to ever experience and we steamed for about 60hrs before reaching South Passage, the Southern most entrance to Shark Bay. I spent many hours when not on watch sitting with my legs dangling over the bow watching Dolphins cavorting in our bow wave or watching large sea-birds, mostly Gannets and Kestrels, skimming along the face of the waves seemingly never moving their wings. They would be so close to the water that you would think their wingtips would touch and they would come crashing down but not so. A few hours south of the Passage Cec called on the radio to bring our attention to a large basking shark lolling several hundred yards ahead of the Nanango. He had slowed to a drift as he approached and expecting the shark to swim out of his path he was standing on the bow to get a good look with his crew as the Nanango went over the top. The Nanango rubbed over the top of the shark, much to Cec’s surprise, Cec swore the boat rose several feet as it did so. Luckily no damage was done and the shark did not seem to be overly bothered with the intrusion into its life. It was huge, a good thirty feet in length. The two of us entered South Passage late in the afternoon and dropped anchor. The Passage would have to be the most magnificent stretch of water in the world. The water is so clear that it is hard to tell exactly where the surface starts and finishes. Hundreds of rays, sharks, fish, crabs, you name it, it was there, could be seen scurrying out of our way as we idled through the passage the following morning. We followed several hundred yards behind the Nanango. Every now and then we would go over a plume of swirling sand that the Nanango stirred up as she brushed the bottom. Eventually we came to deeper water and once again we pushed the revs up as we rounded Cape Bellefin. We could see Herrison Head and then far off in the distance we could make out Peron Peninsula. We kept the Winkle right in the wake of the Nanango as there appeared to be banks and channels running off in all directions. I later learnt that it would be many years before other trawlers would learn their way through the passage. Cec had a wealth of knowledge, a lot of which is now lost to us all. The last 4 miles into Denham could only be travelled on high tide and even then the two of us left a huge muddy vapour trail that ran astern for as far as the eye could see. The Nanango eventually could go no further and dropped anchor about one mile out from the jetty, we came up astern and hung off while Cec gave detailed instructions to Ken on how to get the Winkle into the jetty from his position. Even following these instructions closely we were rubbing bottom and just as we seemed to be safely home there was a loud bump and then the Winkle started shaking badly. We had obviously damaged the propeller, probably on an abandoned mooring. We limped alongside the jetty where

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THE ARRIVAL

Mum, my brothers and what seemed like half the town were waiting.

It was a great reunion, I felt like an explorer returning from a great adventure.

Cec and his crew were right behind us in their dinghy and outboard and joined the welcoming committee. Cec offered to tow the Winkle around to Monkey Mia in a couple of days so that it would be easier to repair the propeller alongside the jetty over there. There is a much greater range of tide at Monkey Mia so the boat could be pulled in close on a high tide and the propeller changed on the low tide. We unloaded the Flame tree trunk from the Winkle along with all other household goods that we had bought. Dad had bought